O corpo alienígena na Holanda contemporânea: encarceração e alimentação forçada dos requerentes de asilo

In May 2013, the Dutch House of Representatives received a memorandum issued by the Council of State, confirming the State’s “right” ‘to administer food and drink to an alien in detention who is on hunger and/or thirst strike, against his will.’ This essay sets out to unpack the tension between the limitation of the detainee’s right to personal autonomy and the violation of the prohibition of torture and, on the other hand the duty of the State to protect the life of those under its care.

We will explore the main premises of this recommendation in the framework of biopolitics, its colonial heritage and contemporary deployment in the Netherlands. In our analysis we borrow from Giorgio Agamben’s work (1998) to define detention as a factual ‘no man’s land’ where the fundamental rights of some persons are suspended. Judith Butler (2006) offers us important conceptual tools for the scrutiny of ‘who counts as human.’ Walter Mignolo’s work (2009) on ‘epistemic imperial racism’ asks us to take on a fuller genealogy of the construction of the category of the non-human in the West.

We will put forward a reflection on such embodied responses to disciplinary and biopower and critically engage the state where ‘life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable,’ defined by Lauren Berlant (2007) as ‘slow death.’ We will finish by exploring the meaning of such hunger strikes as an embodied resistance to State biopower that challenges the invisibility of necropolitical subjects in the Dutch contemporary public realm.